We all have experiences as of physical things, and it is possible to interpret these experiences as perceptions of objects and events belonging to a single universe. In Leibniz’s famous image, our experiences are like a collection of different perspective drawings of the same landscape. They are, as we might say, worldlike.
Ordinarily, we refer the worldlike quality of our experiences to the fact that we all inhabit the same world, encounter objects in a common space, and witness events in a common time.
J.S. Mill thought that we should abandon this way of thinking. According to Mill, the world is a collection of “permanent possibilities of sensation”–fundamental propensities for conscious experiences to occur in certain patterns rather than others (or in no pattern at all). The physical world that we perceive doesn’t explain the worldlike quality of our experiences: it is the worldlike quality of our experiences, or rather it is the tendency for experiences to constitute a. . .